My parents immigrated from Asia to the west. I grew up in the west. I was never happy with living in the west - I had zero cultural community, was very isolated, and suffered from intense racism. My parents also didn’t put in a lot of effort to transmit much culture to me, so as a child I did the best I could by absorbing cultural knowledge from the internet (I do speak my language though). All of this caused me to have severe depression and suicidal ideations. When I told my parents about this, they gaslit me saying racism wasn’t a problem & that I should be happy and grateful for my wonderful life. I didn’t know what there was to be grateful for, because I felt alone, was attacked by racists, was groped by racial fetishists, couldn’t practice my culture or talk in my language openly without attracting extreme backlash.

So at 18 I left my hometown for a nearby city where there was a more established Asian community. I immediately threw myself into the community and became an active participant. At 22 I relocated to a heavily Asian neighbourhood in the same city, and I have remained there since. I also got in a long term relationship with someone who shares my ethnicity and wouldn’t want to seriously date non Asian people because we are too culturally dissimilar to find any common ground to build a relationship on. I’m 27 now. My severe depression and suicidal ideations have improved, but haven’t gone away. Despite all the changes I’ve made in my life since my childhood, I still feel a profound sadness over my parents’ choice to displace me from my homeland and my culture. I’m not well suited for diaspora life because I value community and community continuity. If I had been born in a supportive community of family and friends who all share my background and culture, I would never have left and would have spent my entire life there. I felt like my parents’ immigration took my soul away.

my Asian therapist says unhelpful things like “growing up with different cultures is a privilege because you become exposed to much more things than people who grow up in only one culture!!” and I don’t agree. it’s not a privilege to grow up with different cultures, it’s a situation that caused me a lot of mental instability and suffering & that I personally would not wish on anyone.

this is one main reason why I don’t want to have children. I would not want to inflict a diaspora upbringing on my Asian children with all the suffering & baggage of pain that comes with it. I think it’s cruel for me to subject them to that. My partner and I have discussed this and we agree about how horribly difficult, if not impossible, it would be to raise our Asian children well here, so we decided we would not have any.

I’ve considered relocating to my homeland and talked to my partner about it, but at this current point in time it would be incredibly logistically difficult to pull off. It might happen in a few years though.

I’m not sure what to do to get out of this. It just sucks.